The Florida Department of Juvenile Justice (DJJ) cancelled the contract for a residential youth program run by Youth Services International (YSI). DJJ defaulted on the contract for the Santa Rosa Substance Abuse Treatment Center because the facility’s staff “failed to correct deficiencies and sustain those corrective actions in areas involving ...
The death of a woman on a private transport van raised a much needed spotlight on the private prisoner transport industry. The 54-year-old woman was found slumped over in the back of the Prisoner Transportation Services of America (PTS) van after a grueling two-day transport from Kentucky to South Florida. ...
In response to a female secretary who was raped by a prisoner at Pennsylvania’s State Correctional Institution – Rockview in 2013, the State Attorney General’s office filed a pleading that blamed the woman for her rape.
As PLN previously reported, prisoner Omar Best went into a secretarial office at Rockview ...
The estate of a pretrial detainee who was “neglected to death” sued Florida’s Broward County Jail (BCJ) and its medical contractor, Armor Correctional Health Services (Armor). In other BCJ news, a guard was acquitted of assaulting a pretrial detainee.
Upon entering BCJ in February 2012, Raleigh Priester, 52, carried 240 ...
Severe financial obligations imposed upon offenders who get entangled with the criminal justice system "perpetually punish many ex-offenders and consign them to a life of permanent debt and poverty," concludes a report published by the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
The report "explores the causes and effects of perpetual ...
Hurricane Katrina destroyed the 800 plus bed Plaquemines Parish Detention Center (PPDC). Plans to house out-of-jurisdiction prisoners and corruption by the former sheriff resulted in building a state-of-the-art facility. As of October 2014, the construction of this facility--much larger that the area requires--threatened to wreck the community’s budget just to ...
Four years after Pennsylvania passed legislation prohibiting the shackling of pregnant prisoners after their second trimester, the law is frequently disobeyed. As a result, many prisoners are enduring “barbaric” shackling while in labor.
PLN previously reported on this inhumane practice and the law’s passage. [See: PLN December 2014, p. ...
America’s drug czar is an alcoholic who is approaching his job differently than his predecessors. In leading the White House Office of National Drug Control, Michael Botticelli is following the Obama administration’s policy of shifting away from the “war on drugs.”
Botticelli said the approach is a “very clear pivot ...
The State Attorney for Florida’s Gadsden County has petitioned a state court to hold the sheriff in contempt for allowing prisoners an eight hour furlough without court approval.
“The inmates involved were supposed to have been held on bond or no bond pursuant to court order,” states the petition filed ...
One Florida community has initiated the newest indignity against sex offenders: the placement of signs outside homes warning an occupant is a sexual predator. The move is one another community is hoping to make law.
In April 2013, the Bradford County Sheriff’s office went to the homes of 18 registered ...
